Steve Shuck wrote: > > On a flight home from Coalinga Ca. in our C-75 we notice that we were > using fuel from our center tank even though our wing tanks showed just > less then 1/4 tank. By the time we reached our destination our center > tank sight glass showed what we thought was near empty. The top of the > float rod was near bottom, say 3/4". After we landed we filled up the > center tank and it only took 2.2 gallons in a 6 gallon tank. The cork > must be saturated and sit low in the fuel. > So what do you think?
I had a float that sank. I just left it out of the tank till the next flight and it dried out well enough that I went another year or two before replacing it. (Naturally I sealed the tank while the cap was off. The day it sank was part way through the group mass cluster flight from the Cable Wisconsin National Convention to Oshkosh. The float went down low part way from Cable to Appleton, right over Wausau. MAJOR pucker factor! I circled the Wausau airport for a while at 7500 feet while I evaluated the situation, then flew on to Appleton. When on the ground, I evaluated carefully how much fuel was in the tank compared to the float position and then felt safe to fly on to Oskosh with the group. Now that part was a story that made a sinking nose tank gauge be a minor event. I also had an in-flight situation once where the float started going down toward zero about 10 minutes after taking off with full tanks. I was mid-way between airports that were about 40 miles apart so I kept going forward, downwind. I immediately changed the throttle to max range rpm and, suddenly when the vibration changed, the vibrating wire gauge vibrated itself right back to full. It had just hit a resonant vibration that caused the wire to kind of buzz itself down against the float. This was not too long before the float sank as described above so it was probably not too boyant. -- Ed Burkhead East Peoria, Ill. N3802H, 415-D
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